Robert_Hart

The editing: ‘looking’ at issues

My editor returned the text of Through my Eyes. Again. in under 10 days – much faster than I had expected – and I am now working on a myriad of suggestions. The first result of this is that Chapter 6 of the sequel Through Different Eyes has languished and still exists in outline only – my apologies. As we are also fast approaching the end of a truly chaotic, Covid-19 impacted Academic year here in Australia, my free writing time will be further reduced. I am however determined to get the draft of chapter 6 out before Christmas – after all, editing things like comma usage can be mind-numbing and I will need creative breaks.

One of the issues raised by my editor was to examine every use of the word ‘look’ (and its variants such as ‘looked’, ‘looking’ etc) as I had perhaps overused it. I have lost count of the times I have read through TMEA – but I hadn’t noticed that problem, so it couldn’t be a big issue. I loaded up the complete text in Word and told it to search for ‘look’ – 953 occurrences it dispassionately advised me. My brain leapt out of my skull and did a quick, yammering circuit of the house. In a twenty-chapter book, that is nearly fifty occurrences per chapter and approaching 1% or the total word count.

Once I had recovered a modicum of balance, I gritted my teeth and set to working this issue. Upon examination, some of the offending sentences can just be pruned as not advancing the story. Others required a minor rewording – but some necessitated deep thought and reworking across several sentences and occasionally paragraphs. After 8 chapters, I have reduced the ‘look’ and variants to 503 and the task continues. The current record is eight occurrences on one page and I have found only a single occurrence that cannot be changed – a reference to Alice’s looking glass.

My excellent editor has pointed out a number of other issues – such as ‘show, don’t tell’ in a few places, a possible pruning of a particular content type and several ideas for extension related to a couple of characters.

This is going to keep me busy for a while…

Through my Eyes. Again. - Working with an Editor

I have been pondering hiring a professional editor to work with me on Through my Eyes. Again.. I received useful feedback from readers and a few kindly souls agreed to read and provide more detailed feedback. After much thought, about 10 days ago I finally selected an editor. Since then, she has been firing chapters back to me and I have been racing to work through them.

Many of the edits are simple and require almost no thought on my part: for example, the way I had formatted dialogue between lines was, apparently incorrect and I just needed to accept the changes. Similarly, my editor had been extending some order to my comma usage, which apparently is a bit variable.

Then there are the ‘you’ve used this word twice now in the last couple of paragraphs’ or even more problematical ‘find another way of saying “look” – it’s getting boring’. These require reading through chunks of text and searching for alternate words and phrases (or even completely different sentences) that add to the meaning in the text – not a huge issue but requiring thought – sometimes considerable thought. The disappointing thing about this is that I tried hard to do this myself, but clearly failed.

Then there’s the perennial one for authors – show, don’t tell! I have a tendency to think in pictures and so my writing style has too much ‘telling’ rather than letting the action and dialogue speak for itself. Some of my beta readers have also commented that I give too much detail in places…sigh, that one's another problem I'm working on.

Then there are deeper issues I’m grappling with that have resulted in some additional text in order to clarify what’s happening with Will’s mother and to a lesser extent his father.

All in all, this is a fascinating and yet frustrating process. I’m not sure where this is taking the book in terms of its future, but I am learning a great deal.

A better ebook of TMEA

After much pondering and some discussion with a few other authors (who kindly suggested it didn't need editing) I have decided to get professional editing assistance for Through my Eyes. Again.

I am, in a small way, proud of TMEA. First of all because I actually finished it after many decades of starting a novel only to grind to a halt (my first attempt was age 10). But most of my good feelings about TMEA are as a result of the feedback I received from readers – many of them liked the story and quite a few were able to tell me what they liked (and disliked). After quite a bit of thought, I decided that I would prepare TMEA for self-publishing as an ebook and this decision pushed me to seek out a better cover. A friend put me on to Chris Pink (@TheLost on Discord) who came up with a tremendous cover that gives a theme that will expand readily into the sequel, Through different Eyes.

As I worked preparing the text for the  ebook, I came across some issues…and the more I looked the more I felt that I had to do something about this. I joined a writer’s page on fb and after reading for a week or so, asked for editing help … and almost disappeared under the breaking wave of responses. Quite a number of potential editors offered a sample edit – and I sent off chunks of TMEA and waited to see what happened.

I have been getting sample edits back from a variety of editors in the US, UK and Australia. Some were OK, some were not – and one was outstanding for its sensitivity to the story as well as its eye for detail. 

As a result, I took a deep breath and am spending what is several years of your Patreon support on editing. This is going to be an interesting and I hope a rewarding journey and I expect its results to feed across into TDE as I write that. I somehow doubt that I shall make back enough money from TMEA to actually pay for the editing, but I felt I owed myself this experience at least once.

I have sent off the entire book electronically to the editor in the UK and await results.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

TDE Draft chapter 5

The first draft of TDE Chapter 5 is attached below. Your comments and feedback are most welcome - preferably on the #tde-drafts channel of my Discord server You will find the link to the Sync server where the latest versions of all the draft chapters are located in the #tde-drafts-announcements channel.

In order to access the Sync server you need to link from your Patreon account to my discord server. If you can't then see the #tde-drafts channels on my Discord server, please message me and I will link you in.

There are a few questions I am particularly interested in hearing your feedback on...

1) The 'voice' in TDE is Col's (Kal's) - so it is, at the start of the book, a fourteen-year-old nearly fifteen-year-old girl talking, seeing, thinking, doing. Does the voice come across as female and age appropriate? (Bear in mind that this is a very intelligent girl, speaking five languages plus Latin and her vocabulary is abnormal as a result).

2) The setting of the book starts in England but rapidly moves to Brisbane, Australia. This impacts on the language, colloquialisms and setting. Are there elements that impact too much on a reader's understanding?

3) Then there's the usual author worries about plot, pacing, characterisation etc.

Please let me know what you think - and negative comments are as welcome as positive ones (in fact more so as they help eliminate problems).

Thank you all in advance.
Robert Hart
(Iskander)

New cover coming for "Through my Eyes. Again."

A new cover is coming along with a new edition of "Through my Eyes. Again." The new edition corrects a number of errors in the text and reformats it to make reading easier. Three file types will be available (epub, mobi, and pdf).

I expect to post these in the next few days, downloadable by patrons - so watch this space

The cover was created by Chris Pink and contains a fair bit of symbolism. The underlying design was inspired by an old East German (DDR) propaganda poster and in the top section include the Herne Bay seafront clocktower.

It would help me reach a wider audience if you could  follow me on fb https://www.facebook.com/RobH.Author/

Through my Eyes. Again - feedback survey

Hi there

As a new author, I'm very interested in understanding what my readers thought about my book so I can work on improving my writing. To help with this I've put together a short (about 4 minute) survey that I would very much like you to complete. If the survey sparks you to want to make a more detailed response, please message me directly.

Thanks
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6N99ZRB

On killing characters

Most readers will, at some time, have been rendered to tears when a character that has involved them deeply is killed off by the author. My first experience of this was at age 12 in the final chapter of the Lord of the Rings, when Bilbo departs for the Grey Havens. Since then there have been many occasions where I have stopped reading as the page blurs beyond my tears. Most recently this occurred in the last book of Ryan Sylander's Hook. Pick and Lens trilogy – if you haven’t read this, please treat yourself by picking up the books (he's here on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/ryansylander/posts). They contain great writing, particularly the final of the trilogy, Shutter Release. Ryan writes of deep emotions with subtlety and aching beauty.

As a new author, I recently found myself at the other end of the pen, so to speak. Through my Eyes. Again. grew organically from the initial scene. There was no plot line and the interactions between the characters drove the first half or more of the book as Will, Col, Frida (Col’s mother) and their friend, Lili, interacted with each other and the circumstances they found themselves in. As the story grew, I found myself looking at the far horizon where various endings flickered in the distant mists. I toyed with several endings (including one where Col and Mutti Frida were actually ‘sleepers’ planted by the KGB – but I could not see that fitting their characters and it was quickly discarded). Finally, I came to the ending that occurred in chapter 20 – and found that to get there in a believable fashion, I needed to kill a character.

As an author, I invest emotionally in my characters – even the ones I don’t like very much – and so killing one of them is not easy. I struggled to find a way of reaching the desired ending in some other way, but none of the ideas ‘fitted’.

Unfortunately…

Through different Eyes - draft of Chapter 4

As promised, here is the first draft of Chapter 4. As always, I would really appreciate your feedback. My discord is the best place for that and I recently sent you all an invitation link in case you couldn't find it here.

Take care of you and yours in these strange times.

Iskander

Does TDE have an outline?

Good news - chapter 4 (at nearly 10,000 words) is now written. I need to read through again and do some edits but I will be posting the resulting draft this coming weekend.

I've been asked several times now if TDE has an outline, as TMEA grew 'organically' towards an end that moved around a bit as the book progressed.

TDE is a bit different. It's Col's story from when she disappeared from Will's and Lili's lives early in the summer term of 1964 and it necessarily has to link up with Will in Leipzig in August 1970 - both of these moments are locked in space and time in TMEA.

So I started TDE with these points and played around with ideas that would keep Will and Col apart for those six years (again, locked in by TMEA), even if they were trying to find each other. Much of this was set up in part in the last chapters of TMEA by killing off Lili as were she still around, Col could use her to contact Will. I did not like doing that, but I could not see a way round that problem. Similarly, Will's family had to fracture and move from Herne Bay so Col could not find him there or track him from there.

Finally, I had to move Col and Mutti Frida out of England and require them to remain hidden to escape Col's father. This would give time for Will's track to go cold and for the deeper development of Col's character.  Mrs Henderson's use of Col and Mutti Frida as bait to smoke out a large part of the eastern Block agent network set that up as they had to run and hide. Sending them to Australia was a no-brainer as I have lived there (mostly) for decades (apart from three years in Silicon Valley). Then there's the collapse of the Eastern Block in August 1968 (in this alternate world established by TMEA) which must impact on Mutti and Col.

These events create the barest of bones on which TDE is growing and a more complete skeleton is almost finished (there are still a couple of vague spots that are not yet fully in focus).  However, I expect that during the writing process things will happen and characters will wrench things in unexpected directions, changing things as a result, but the story still has to thread the needle through the events set by TMEA.

I hope this answers the question - more detail would provide spoilers which I want to avoid as you experience TDE for the first time.

Thanks for coming on this journey with me - and please use the Discord channels to provide me with feedback.

Take care of you and yours in these strange and difficult times,

Iskander

Through different Eyes - Chapter 4 draft is coming...

I thought I'd let you know how the draft of Chapter 4 was coming along  - it's nealy 8,000 words and I think that I will be able to finish and post it this weekend - marking of exams and assignments permitting. There's a fair bit of scene setting to be done as Kal and Mutti Frida settle into their new histories and lives in Australia - but then ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation - Australia's verion of MI6) pokes its nose in and things get interesting...

Thank you for your patience as the writing process moves at varied speeds.

Take care of you and yours in these strange and uncertain times.

Iskander

Free live streams on Patreon - and TDE writing news

Patreon hosts some interesting people  - and they get involved in Patreon's Show-up. These are usually on Fridays at 10am Pacific Time and the link for those is here. Unfortunately, timings are not great for Australia though!

• https://events.patreon.com/theshowup?utm_campaign=show_up_sep_2&utm_source=events&utm_medium=email&utm_content=creator_email_1

There's also a Show up this Wednesday  September 2nd at 4:00 p.m. PT, details below - and you can sign up at the above link.

 The Show Up is bringing some   lush vibes to your living room with ecstatic tracks from Atish, and the hypnotic sounds   of Berlin-based composer and producer Hainbach. We'll chat about   their creative careers, hear some special tracks and connect with fans from  around the world. 

Writing News

Chapter 4 of Through different Eyes is progressing, currently about 4,000 words and I hope to have the draft up for you to read in a couple of weeks. I've also been fiddling with my short story After an I think it might be going somewhere. There are a couple of flies in the timing ointment though - I'm coming up to the end of term which means the marking load is about to explode and then I am due to fly in the State Gliding Championships in the second half of September, if they go ahead (Covid is currently hovering on the razor's edge of spike/suppression and a spike would stop that).

Take care of you and yours in these strange times
Iskander

TDE - draft Chapter 3

Hi there patrons

It's a bit later than I had hoped, but here's the first draft of TDE Chapter 3. As always, I am very interested in your comments, so please be frank about things. My Discord server is the best place to have that conversation.

Iskander

TDE Draft Chapter 3 is coming...

Hi there, Patrons

I had hoped to post the draft of Chapter 3 this weekend - but life, as always, gets in the way. If I have time to finish and proof it, I'll post it during the week. However, my spare time is seriously constrained by several things, ranging from an Instructor panel meeting at my gliding club to a plasma donation (which takes so much longer than a blood donation) and boning up on the standard particle model (particularly the Feynman diagrams) for my 12 Physics students. This means it might not happen until next weekend.

Anyhow - it's currently at nearly 6,500 words so I expect it to be around 7,000+ when finished and proofed (unless I decide on major cuts). It's a complicated chapter to write as there's quite a bit of scene setting for a major part of this book...and this requires a chunk of historical research. Thus far, the internet has sufficed, but I fear I am going to have to get access to and photograph some historical maps for Chapter 4...we'll see.

Take care of you and yours in these strange times.

Iskander

TMEA Sequel (Through different Eyes) - Chapters 1 & 2 drafts are here

Hi there

Please find below a redrafted sequel chapter1 and the first version of chapter 2. As always, I'm very interested in your comments and critiques.

I expect the writing rate to decrease somewhat as I am back to work on Monday, but I hope to put out a draft chapter at least once a month for a while as I have outlines up to chapter 5...until the characters whack me round the earhole and tell me differently!

Stay safe in this uncertain world.

Iskander

Through different Eyes - draft Chapter 1

As promised, I'm working on a sequel to "Through my Eyes. Again." - it's working title is "Through Different Eyes" - and here is the first draft of Chapter 1.

Your comments/critique would be greatly appreciated.

Through my Eyes. Again. - ebook, mobi and pdf versions available

Hi there

I have managed to get Scrivener to produce reasonable (certainly not perfect) ebook (epub, mobi) and pdf versions of TMEA - and they are available below for patrons.

Thank you for your support - and please let me know if you find errors in these!

Iskander

Rewritten final chapter

Hi folks

As I have indicated, I have completely rewritten the final chapter. It is now two chapters (19 & 20) and beta versions of these are attached below.

I would greatly appreciate your feedback on these - preferably on my Discord server - please use the tmea-spoilers.

Enjoy (I hope).

On Listening

I have received quite a few interesting and insightful comments about Through my Eyes. Again. since posting the final chapter. As I have already revealed, this is my first 'public' attempt at a novel (and the first novel I have ever finished) and there are very clearly some rough edges and dangling threads that require rectification. I have also had several lengthy discussions with a couple of authors whose opinion I greatly value. The upshot of this is that I am embarking on a larger and more detailed review of TMEA than just 'tidying things up'. 

I am considerably rewriting the final chapter to provide more detail of what happened to Will after Col and Mutti Frida disappeared in late April 1964. This is already underway and that final chapter is probably going to end up as two chapters. 

At the same time, I have two versions of chapter 1 of the sequel under way as I try to work out the best way for the story to unfold. As with TMEA, I have a beginning (well, two - a different one for each version of chapter 1) and a glimmer of an ending through the fog. 

And this is a problem I will have to watch carefully, because some of the faults on TMEA are due to the story growing organically - there was almost no planning of any kind. The characters lived in my head and practically wrote the story themselves. For example, whilst Col was German from the beginning and I had a picture of him in my head, it was only during that first conversation with Will in the cedar tree that Col's true nature was revealed. Similarly, Mutti Frida's childhood in various Nazi prisons and then in Ravensbrück concentration camp was only revealed when Col told Will he also feared his father. 

One of the criticisms I have received is for that final sentence - but I do not apologise for ending the book there. The more I thought about how to end, that ending was the most appropriate. At the time, I had no sequel planned and yet clearly that ending just about demands one. 

And one is now growing. 

I clearly have quite a lot to learn about storytelling and for this I apologise to you, my readers: you have been (are being) a tremendous help and for this I freely give thanks to all of you. 

So, please keep an eye on my blog, Patreon and discord server for more news as the revision and sequel progress. I do not expect to re-post the revised version for several months, though.

Tidying up

Yesterday I posted the final chapter of Through my Eyes. Again. to my Patreon. I am now busy on a final (I hope) pass through all nineteen chapters, checking spelling, grammar, imposing uniform formatting on book titles and foreign languages words and sentences (and deciding which ones require translations and which ones do not)…in other words the vital but boring ‘paperwork’ part of writing. Somewhat inevitably, re-reading what I have written for the umpteenth time leads to inevitable fiddling around the edges: a more apposite word choice here, a slight reordering of words there. Interestingly, some sections attract more fiddling than others – which suggests to me that some parts of my writing ‘flowed’ more fluently than most of the rest, which required some – or a lot of – wrangling.

And whilst this is going on, I have a helpful reader pointing out to me that MI5 would not have been the UK security organisation dealing with Col and Mutti Frida, but MI6. MI5 is concerned with domestic security issues as opposed to MI6 handling international issues. When Mutti Frida and Col arrived in the British sector of West Germany, they would have ended up talking to MI6 and Mr Watling, Mutti Frida’s contact, and his trilby hat would have worked for MI6. So now I must go back over the chapters to find that problem and fix every occurrence … which leads to more temptation to tinker with the text.

I asked an author who has given her time to me quite generously at what point she decided that a book was ‘done’. She, perhaps with some tongue in cheek, replied that it is finished when ‘you get sick of looking at it and evict it from your life’. TMEA is perhaps approaching that point, but there is still work to do, such as the ebook version of TMEA, for which I am using Scrivener. This is a huge program for authors and I am slowly getting to grips with its incredibly wide feature set. For this, there is some cover art in production and the ebook will have to wait for that to complete.

All this is happening underneath ‘real life’ – with all its Covid-19 complications, difficulties and anxiety as we Australians (state by state) become guinea pigs in the experiment that is our release from lock down. Given the behaviour being reported this weekend, I am not optimistic that we will avoid a second wave and a return to lock down in our capital cities.

But, in the depths, there are new story ideas bubbling away at a low simmer.

Through my Eyes. Again. - chapter 19

Here's the final chapter of TMEA.

I'm now working a final pass on all 19 chapters and from them I will post ebook versions shortly - when the cover art work is complete and I've sorted out how to get Scrivener to create the ebooks in the format I want.

Thank you for coming with me on this journey! 

On creating characters and worlds

A reader has suggested to me that there was something not quite right with Will’s character – and this, as you might imagine, is a difficult thing for an author to hear about any character, let alone the protagonist of a story. But it is important to recognise that, from their perspective, they are right: that is the way this reader understands Will. Fortunately, in conversation last year with an author I respect deeply, I was reminded that every reader brings themselves to a story: in effect, everyone reads a different version of Through my Eyes. Again. and an author has no control over those versions. To my friend, this is one of the delights of writing although to a novice writer like myself, that feels, well, a bit unsettling. It is as if I drop a pebble in the water, creating a specific set of ripples, but they then interact in unexpected ways with the objects the ripples encounter. I understand the Physics of waves well but there is a strange metaphysics occurring when those ripples are a story and the objects it interacts with are people and their imaginations.

This ‘everybody has their own version’ is an issue I am slowly coming to terms with as readers send me their comments. There is an instinctive desire to write back “Yes, but…” and, so far, this has been constrained. 

In addition to having a weird composite protagonist, Through my Eyes. Again. also plays with history. Its world starts out close to the one we live in, but there are differences. Small ones that Will recognises quite quickly but then larger ones. Will knows almost immediately that the world he has arrived in is different but he has no idea if those differences are small and insignificant or, perhaps, they have a domino effect cascading into big and possibly dangerous changes. Some of the differences Will recognises – but there are others he does not. Playing with alternate history is fun but quite dangerous as history is a complex of intertwining threads and readers bring their own interpretation of the specific ‘what ifs’ involved. By the end of Through my Eyes. Again. the world Will has fallen into is very different to the one he previously lived through.

It is my hope that this different world is believable – in the sense of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ necessary for all stories.

Through my Eyes. Again. - Chapter 18

Hi

Here is the penultimate chapter of TMEA. I am currently spendingmy spare time working out with Scrivener in order to provide clean electronic book versions of TMEA. This will happen some time after the release of the final chapter next week - depending on how quickly I master this aspect of Scrivener.

In the meantime, I hope you are enjoying TMEA. If you are, please let me know via a comment here, on my Discord channel or at Stories on Line (and don't forget to vote, please).

I am hoping to acquire some cover art for TMEA - but the timeline for that is a complete fog, so please don't ask!

See you next week for the final chapter.

The final full stop is not the end…

This week has been strange in a number of ways. Through my Eyes. Again. is assuredly not my first attempt at writing a novel (that was at age ten), but it is the first time I have finished one, which is quite special, whatever the merits or otherwise of the object itself.

Now, you might be thinking that finishing is a function of having vast expanses of time as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown, but that is not the case: in real life, I am in my eleventh year as a senior Maths/Physics teacher, currently grappling with the vicissitudes of remote learning. I have been up to my eyeballs (and beyond) re-jigging learning materials and using the Internet to try and help my students learn the material and provide them with meaningful feedback, whilst we cope with their flaky internet connections, unreliable computers and understandable engagement lapses – all conducted from my 160-year-old family heirloom dining table, whilst fending off two affectionate ginger cats that want to be part of things. (I have introduced them to my students as my teaching assistants.)

So, writing time during these last few weeks has been in short supply. The end of TMEA has been in sight for a couple of months but getting there took me longer than I had expected for a couple of reasons that have nothing to do with the pandemic.

First, there were scenes that I had not expected that demanded to be included – and from that you can understand that my initial planning of TMEA was, to be polite, rudimentary. So as opposed to ending in chapter eighteen, the story ballooned to nineteen chapters. Indeed, at times, it felt that the end was receding as fast as I wrote.

The other problem was which of the three or four … or five … endings was going to make the final cut. I had started TMEA with a beginning scene and an ending scene and a great deal of fog to walk through to get there. As Willi, Col, Lili and Mutti Frida evolved through writing, different potential endings sprouted along the far horizon, weeds trying to smother the ending I was trying to nurture and reach. Ultimately, the ending that has survived is one that is a close genetic descendent of that originally foreseen. But some of the others were…different (I do not want to provide any hints/spoilers).

Interestingly, I have discovered that the final full stop is not the end of the writing process. TMEA exists as nineteen separate Word files and these need to be combined to produce epub and pdf versions and so I started exploring a variety of ways of doing that, which lead me to a realisation that I needed to sweep through those nineteen files, cleaning them up – mostly grammar and spelling stuff, but also imposing a standard way of including the several non-English languages in the story. This also meant deciding which ones required a translation and which ones did not; these are difficult choices that I have probably got wrong in places. Where I have not provided a translation, I think what is being said is obvious from the context, but since I know what is being said, that decision is problematical. Along the way, inevitably, I have made small tweaks in the text – nothing that changes the story, but hopefully these are stylistic improvements.

Whilst doing this, I realised there was a risk of endless tinkering, so I asked my daughter how she decides when a book is ‘done’ – her response was “When you get sick of looking at it and evict it from your life.” I am not at that stage yet, but perhaps soon…I have five more chapters to sweep though and then thread together.

I hope you enjoy Through my Eyes. Again. – if you do, I would love to hear from you why that is so and if you do not, thoughtful criticism is also very welcome as we grow through examining our mistakes not our successes.

You can comment here or at my discord https://discord.gg/7pVvRFF

                                          May the Fourth be with you

Through my Eyes. Again - Chapter 17

Here is chapter 17 of TMEA. The latest news is that the writing is now complete - at 19 Chapters.

I am currently doing a final sweep through the entire book, editing and tweaking and will upload a complete copy of the book as an epub and pdf a week after posting chapter 19 to SOL.

This writing experience (I hope the first of several) has been interesting. Whilst TMEA may not be great literature, it is definitely not rubbish - but where it sits on that continuum is very much up to you - the readers.

On the road to recovery?

Here in Australia, there is a feeling that we are, perhaps, past the worst of the pandemic. The number of new cases has been falling for days and the deaths are now in single digits each day. As we look around the world, it is clear that, compared to many similar countries, we have passed relatively unscathed (fewer than 7,000 cases and about 80 deaths, so far) through this first infection wave, in part through the luck of being an island nation. But the experts are reminding us that there could so easily be a second wave and they point to the problems Singapore is facing. With care, Australia is capable of avoiding a second wave as, sometime in the next few weeks with strong tracking and tracing in place, we slowly relax the lockdown, piece by careful piece. But there is no real end in sight until one of the seventy or so vaccines under development is deployed – if even one reaches that stage.

As dawn broke yesterday, we Australians – residents in my street and people across the country – assembled in their driveways before 6 am, holding candles. At 6 am, we heard the notes of a distant Last Post float across the still air: ANZAC day, our most important memorial of those that have died in conflict. It dates back to 25th April 1915 when the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (hence ANZAC) rushed ashore on the beach of what is now called ANZAC cove, playing their part in the debacle that was the Gallipoli campaign. It is an interesting commentary on this country that one of the founding myths of our nation is of a military defeat and retreat.

Today is particularly poignant as we obey the social distancing required by the pandemic: there was no Dawn Service, there will be no parade by the bemedalled veterans, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren through flag-waving crowds followed by “Two Up” and beers, no gathering of peripatetic Australian youth in ANZAC cove itself or on the battlefields of France. But this year we are also remembering the deaths occurring from the pandemic and saluting the sacrifice of those around the world on the front line of the current campaign – not just the doctors, nurses and care workers, but all the essential workers needed to keep our society working, even at this very constrained level, who in their service risk infection, unlike we who can shelter in place.

Perhaps this unusual stillness provides us with a chance to think about the sort of society we should rebuild on the other side. Wound into the ANZAC myth is the veneration of mateship born in the trenches of Gallipoli and France – a belief in supporting and standing by your mates, along with a disdain for rank and privilege. According to my grandfather who (unlike his brother) survived four years in the British army on the western front, Australian soldiers were renowned for their larrikin ways and refusal to salute. This mateship created in Australia a yearning for ‘a fair go’, for an egalitarian society where what you do matters more than who you are, although the recent decades of neo-liberal ‘the-individual-is-all’ social philosophy have tried to drown that yearning in increasingly feverish consumerism where the economy is all that matters.

But now, in the unusual stillness of an ANZAC day, there is time to think. In this emergency, we are discovering that it is not the bank and industry CEOs, celebrities, social influencers, politicians, the self-inflated shock jocks and their ilk that matter; it is the doctors, nurses, cleaners, scientists, shelf-stackers, check out operators, delivery drivers, rubbish collectors, posties, paramedics and police that are keeping us safe at some risk to themselves – many of them seriously undervalued until now. We are also seeing the injustice inherent in a hugely casualised workforce, over a million of whom are, by fiat of the government, relegated to lesser government financial support or no support at all as are the temporary visa workers originally brought in to support our economy who, like the foreign students, have been bluntly told to go home – when there are no flights.

In this quiet pause, we should be asking what we want to build on the other side. Do we want to rebuild a society of increasing inequality and injustice or do we want something kinder, gentler, more people-centric? A country where the clean air we are enjoying as a result of the shutdown persists? A country where we can once again trust our government to serve all the people rather than the interests of a few?

For all its horror, this pandemic presents a tremendous opportunity to reset our society. It is to be hoped that it will be a long, long time before something akin to this pandemic creates a similar societal shock.

We have a generational duty not to waste this opportunity.

Chapter 16 of "Through my Eyes. Again."

Here's chapter 16 of TMEA - enjoy!

Feedback is greatly appreciated - either below or on the discord channels.

Through my Eyes. Again. - Chapter 15

Here's chapter 15, with chapter 14 now on SOL.

Why write?

Spike Milligan, when asked why he wrote, claimed that God’s finger pressed on him and he had to write. As a fully paid up atheist, I am pretty sure there is no God, so I do not have that excuse.

Robert Heinlein famously said:

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

And that, in part, is certainly great advice in today’s virus-infected world. Humour aside, I think Heinlein was suggesting that most writing should stay private due to its quality – or rather lack thereof. It may well be important to the author, but that does not make it worthwhile to others.

I – and many, many other authors – write and then publish their work for free on one of the many internet sites that exist to facilitate this. So it is clear that writing, of itself, draws people to it. I can only speak for myself, others will have their own reasons.

I learned to read at age 6 – quite late compared to my children (but much earlier than my dyslexic brother). Interestingly, I can remember it all coming together and the shapes on the page becoming words, sentences, stories. Against this, I do not remember learning to read music: it is as if I could always do so – which is manifestly not possible. But I digress. Reading opened worlds to me – and I dived in to escape an unhappy childhood. I rapidly discovered a major disadvantage of reading: books end leaving me aching for more. To overcome this, I started imagining sequels – what happened when She returned as promised, more adventures like The Horse and his Boy with the Narnia four, a sequel to The Chrysalids. From there it was a short step to attempting to create my own worlds – a task given a much wider canvas as Science Fiction burgeoned during the 1960s.

y attempts at writing all foundered early in chapter 1: I reread my work and it was severely lacking. In part, this was due to heightened self-criticism from my exposure to the great writers and their writings in several languages but mostly to an honest recognition that what I wrote was dross. For decades, this situation persisted.

I watched my daughter walk away from her completed Science degree to start a career in fiction – and she has succeeded. We have spent many hours talking and corresponding about her writing. I was privileged to read early drafts of her books and send back my thoughts. Through all this, she encouraged me to write – and eventually I sent her the first draft of what became the opening of Through my Eyes. Again. I sent her more and she provided more feedback, but at about Chapter 3, she told me that she did not want to read any more until it was finished. Training wheels were off, I was being sent solo.

As I approach the end of TMEA, it has been an interesting experience: parts of the story flowed easily on to the page, yet other parts were a huge struggle. From the release of the first chapter, the feedback I have received has been a significant extrinsic motivation to continue – please continue to provide it – but it is not the most important motivator.

I might disagree with Spike Milligan about God – but something intrinsic pushes me to write.

Through my Eyes. Again. - Chapter 14

Hi Folks

I hope that you and yours are staying well. Here is Chapter 14 of TMEA, which I hope provides a morsel of escape for you.

Chapter 12 & 13

Well - last week I made a complete mess of my posting and managed to post Chapter 11 - again - instead of chapter 12. I was very much distracted last weekend as I needed to persuade my work that I had to work from home to protect my spouse, who suffers from asthma,  from Covid-19. Fortunately, I was successful in that endeavour and I now feel much happier about our circumstances as we hunker down to see out this pandemic.

So, here are both Chapter 12 and 13.

Please let me know if you are enjoying this - and any comments you have.